Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [50]
The Doctor fell silent and turned back to the window as Sydney removed his cardigan and turned his attention to his socks. The pale disc of the sun was creeping into the sky, painting the landscape lemon and grey. He glanced at Sydney’s bedside dock. ‘I think I should leave you in peace. You’ve been very helpful, Sydney, thank you.’
With a nod, the Doctor slipped out of the room. In the corridor, he paused outside Doris’s door. Silently, he opened it a crack and listened. With a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach, he realised that he couldn’t hear Doris breathing, couldn’t hear any of those tiny little sounds that people make in their sleep. He pushed opened the door and stepped into the room.
She lay sprawled on the bed, arms thrown out at her sides.
Her eyes were wide, dry and dead, her face a portrait of unbelieving horror, preserved in aspic. By the side of her head was a scrunched-up pillow. He gently closed her eyes and examined her fingers, curled up like autumn leaves, stiff and cold. He’d seen death a million times, but there was something more pitiful, more disturbing about this one. No doubt the official verdict would be ‘old age’, maybe a heart attack. But the look on her face and the pillow by her head, still bearing the indentations of a strong, determined pair of hands, painted another, much darker picture. That someone was capable of such a merciless and calculating act against a defenceless old woman...
Quietly, he rearranged her, made her a little more decorous –
if such a thing was possible. As he positioned her hands on her lap, he noticed something else: a thin trickle of blood running from her left ear. He touched it, wondering what could have caused it. Glancing round the room, puzzled, his eyes alighted on a large, fluffy ball of emerald wool sitting on the dressing table.
Speared through its centre was a lone knitting needle.
Ace knew she hadn’t shaken Sooal off – just given herself a breathing space. She pressed herself into a shallow alcove in the corridor wall, flinching as she felt cold water drip down her neck.
Sooal had the advantage that he knew the ship. And that he seemed better able to see in the dark. And, of course, he had a gun. Apart from that, she comforted herself, she held all the cards.
She peered back along the corridor. She’d spent the last ten minutes clambering up and down ladders, doubling back on herself when she realised she was leaving wet footprints all over the place and racing up and down corridors. So no change there, she thought grimly. It began to occur to her that all Sooal needed to do was to sit by the transmat and wait. Of course, she should have gone straight back to the transmat when she’d escaped from the sleeper chamber; but a) she didn’t know how to get back there, and b) if Sooal had any sense he’d have turned it off himself.
The thought occurred to her that maybe he’d altered the settings so that the next person to use it would get beamed into space or inside a rock or something. She swallowed dryly.
Away in the distance, huge and echoey, she could hear the sound of footsteps. Checking she still had her torch, Ace moved on into a chamber which – judging from the arrangement of mildewed seats and cracked viewing screen – had been the ship’s bridge. One or two of the control panels glimmered faintly: essential systems, lighting, air – that sort of thing – Ace assumed, glancing at them. But was there anything she could use? She scanned the displays again: she could try turning the power off, but that would just plunge the two of them into darkness, and Ace had a pretty good idea who would work best in those conditions.
‘Isn’t this getting rather tiresome?’ came a voice, distant and hollow, the sibilants rattling off the ship’s walls, like the hiss of escaping steam. Ace crouched down behind the control panel and peered back along the corridor. A long, dark shadow crawled along the wall towards her. ‘Maybe we can come to some arrangement.